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This is what we KNOW thus far Link Hudson
– there was no turkey – came later with the masons
– natives brought 5 dead deer
– few pilgrims shot some birds for supper
– there were plenty of meat and fruit pies
– may have been some gravy {not too sure}
– there were no stores so no black friday sales
– Englishmen eat together – both puritans and criminals
BUT there was a great celebration of FREEDOM

It was significant theologically as a first harvest feast
governor thanked GOD for the natives for teaching them how to hunt and survive the cold winter – most Englishmen who came were craftsmen or city criminals with no farm / hunt skills

None of the pilgrims had proper papers and did NOT follow the migration process. They actually fled in a caravan, storm the eastern sea border and simply entered Jan Dixon Sykes
Yes many of them were real criminals running from the law in Europe and proceeded to establish gangs that held the common wealth trade some of which illegal gun and drug related Gerardo de Dominicis

No it did not work too well for the native citizens, but somehow by the grace of GOD here we are 500 years ALL thankful for SUCH history

They had been given a choice between religious conformity and exile and they chose exile. Then the king gave them permission to settle in the new world. So wouldn’t they have been on sort of okay terms with King James after they had harried them out of the land?

The pilgrims arrived to no ones land. The natives didn’t consider the land their own so it wasn’t an “invasion”. Turkeys are American birds and could be found in North America (the Aztecs used to eat it before the Spaniards arrived and called it guajolotl).

Troy Day Natives in modern US and Canada territories didn’t have the notion of “private property of the land”, so the land wasn’t their property. More advanced indigenous civilizations like the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas and others they had the concept of private property, building empires and state cities. So there’s a big difference.

Gerardo de Dominicis Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe and an expert on Wampanoag history told me the real story.

“This is not revisionist history,” Peters promised. “This is history that’s just been overlooked because people have become very, very comfortable with the story of happy Pilgrims and friendly Indians. They’re very content with that — even to the point where no one really questioned how is it that Squanto knew how to speak perfect English when they came.”

Here’s what really happened.

In 1614, six years before the Pilgrims landed in modern-day Massachusetts, an Englishman named Thomas Hunt kidnapped Tisquantum from his village, Patuxet, which was part of a group of villages known as the Wampanoag confederation. (Europeans had started visiting the northeast of what is now the United States by the 1520s, and probably as early as the 1480s.)

Hunt took Tisquantum and around two dozen other kidnapped Wampanoag to Spain, where he tried to sell them into slavery.

“It caused quite a commotion when this guy showed up trying to sell these people,” Mann said. “A bunch of people in the church said no way.”

Tisquantum escaped slavery — with the help of Catholic friars, according to some accounts — then somehow found his way to England.

He finally made it back to what is now Massachusetts in 1619. As far as historians can tell, Tisquantum was the only one of the kidnapped Wampanoags to ever return to North America, Peters notes.

As far as historians can tell, Tisquantum was the only one of the kidnapped Wampanoags to ever return to North America.
But while Tisquantum was in Europe, an epidemic had swept across New England.

“The account that’s recorded by Gov. Bradford of Plymouth Plantation is that there’s a shipwreck of French sailors that year on Cape Cod,” Mann said. “One of them carried some disease and it wiped out a huge percentage of the population in coastal new England. … The guess is it was some kind of viral hepatitis, which is easily communicated in water. It exploded like chains of firecrackers.”

When Tisquantum returned to Patuxet, he found that he was the village’s only survivor.

“Into this bumbled the Pilgrims,” Mann said. “They had shown up in New England a few weeks before winter. … Up until the Pilgrims, the pattern had been pretty clear. Europeans would show up, and Indians would be interested in their trade goods, but they were really uninterested in letting [Europeans] permanently occupy land.” Often, armed native people would even force Europeans to leave if they attempted to stay too long. “Patuxet ultimately becomes Plymouth,” Peters explained. “They find this cleared land and just the bones of the Indians. They called it divine providence: God killed these Indians so we could live here.”

Troy Day is interesting to note that this is what the English did in the Americas, not the Spaniards. The English killed the natives until the XIX century and put the Indians in reservations. The Spaniards killed the Indians when they conquered the empires but once they won they stop the killings. There were more indigenous deaths by infectious deseases than by the sword. Spain didn’t have “colonies” in the Americans, the American territories were part of the Spanish Empire (just like Catalonia, Leon or other territories in the Iberian peninsula) and the inhabitants (indigenous) were considered spanish citizens. There were laws made specially to protect the Indians from exploitation and the Spaniards since the beginning started mixing with the Indians, bringing forth what’s called now as the “Latin race” and what constitutes now 80% of the Latin American population. The history of the English and Spanish people in the americas is completely different.

Massasoit, a local Wampanoag leader, didn’t trust Tisquantum. “He looks at this guy and smells trouble,” Mann said. Massasoit kept Tisquantum under what was essentially house arrest until the Pilgrims showed up and promptly started starving to death.

Patuxet wasn’t the only native village decimated by the plague. The entire Wampanoag confederation had been badly hit — as much as 75 percent of the Wampanoag population was wiped out, Mann said. But the Narragansett, a rival neighboring group, basically weren’t affected by the disease at all. That put the Wampanoag in a precarious strategic position. Massasoit had an idea.

“He decides we’ll ally with these guys, set up a good trading relationship, control supply of English goods, and the Narragansett won’t be able to attack us,” Mann said.

On March 22, 1621, Massasoit went to meet with the Pilgrims. He brought Tisquantum along to translate.

Gerardo de Dominicis you are just plain wrong about the land property customs Up until the Pilgrims, the pattern had been pretty clear. Europeans would show up, and Indians would be interested in their trade goods,

but they were really uninterested in letting [Europeans] permanently occupy land.”

Often, armed native people would even force Europeans to leave if they attempted to stay too long

Gerardo de Dominicis There was a great variety of cultures, languages, etc. among Native American tribes. I would imagine the Indians in what is now Massachusetts would not have been pleased if some white folks plopped into the middle of their village and built a house without permission back then. The Pilgrims eventually had to reach an agreement with the cheif/king of the tribe in that area regarding their settling the land of an old village that had been wiped out by a plague of one of the old world diseases the natives had contracted through contact with westerners. The land may have been too densely populated a few decades before, before the disease wiped out much of the Indian population and opened up land on the coast where the English could settle.

Link Hudson what I meant is that the notion of private property of the land was inexistent in the same sense we understand it today. Nomad tribes don’t see the land as theirs but only as the source of their food. Sedentary tribes and groups are the ones who understands the concept of property of the land. Of course that for nomad tribes having foreigners in the land means problems because they would have to share the resources (hence the fights among tribes) but in last instance they could move somewhere else because the land didn’t belong to them, was there to be used but now owned (they used to follow the migration of buffalos and dears). That’s the difference with the Spaniards and the empires in modern day Latin America. Aztecs, Mayans, toltecs, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, incans, etc., were civilizations with a more advanced understanding and notions than the northern Indians, that’s why they didn’t move when the Spaniards arrived, they already had cities with buildings, markets, schools, etc.

Link Hudson I don’t know brother, they might be. It’s also true that archeologists have found ruins of cities in North America that seems to show a certain degree of civilization among the native Americans.

NOT true Gerardo de Dominicis The American nation began to expand west during the middle eighteen hundreds. People settled in the great open areas of the Dakotas, Utah, Wyoming, and California. The movement forced the nation to deal with great tribes of native American Indians. The Indians had lived in the western territories for hundreds of years.

Troy Day out of their territories but they didn’t own the land, they were nomads living in teepees. In the former Mexican territories of the north only the Pueblo Indians had something similar to cities.

You need to re-read some history brother For reasons that are still debated, the Maya centers of the southern lowlands went into decline during the 8th and 9th centuries and were abandoned shortly thereafter. This decline was coupled with a cessation of monumental inscriptions and large-scale architectural construction. Non-ecological theories of Maya decline are divided into several subcategories, such as overpopulation, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, and the collapse of key trade routes. Ecological hypotheses include environmental disaster, epidemic disease, and climate change. There is evidence that the Maya population exceeded carrying capacity of the environment including exhaustion of agricultural potential and over-hunting of megafauna. Some scholars have recently theorized that an intense 200 year drought led to the collapse of Maya civilization.

Gerardo de Dominicis the Spanish found an amazing large city in what is now Mexico city led by King Montezuma, where they used to have priests that cut out their victim’s hearts. They may have sold their meat in the city, too. The Maya still existed in villages. They once had lived in great cities.

Troy Day the Spaniards once they conquered the cities they stopped dstroying them. That’s why there are still ruins and temples of cities already empty when the Spaniards arrive. What they did in Mexico City was to take the stones from the Aztec buildings to build Spanish buildings but even then there are still Aztec ruins in the heart of Mexico City, with the most important temple besides the catholic cathedral and other ruins around in other parts of the city, even one subway station has an old pyramid. The ones that were interested in the destruction of códex and idols were the catholic priests, not the soldiers nor the conquistadores and not all of them because even some codex writers were catholic priests and wrote the believes and ways of life of the Aztecs to preserve them for the future, this is how we know about them and what they believed.

Gerardo de Dominicis I wonder if some victim of the Aztec back then called out to the most high God for justice over one of those human sacrifices. The Aztecs accomplished much without beasts of burden or some of the technology in other parts of the world. But their religion was awful and brutal.

One of my Latin American history professors said that the Spanish forbade cannibalism, and after they introduced pork, the Aztecs liked it very much because it tasted like less salty human flesh.

I wonder if the put border patrol and called Columbus invader, which he very much was by the way Gerardo de Dominicis most of the remains (that are not deep in the jungle) are modernly rebuilt I was recently at Chicken Pizza only to find out how modern it has gotten since the last end of the world 12.21.2012